Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru I’d like to talk to you about U.S. Patent # 174465, also known as the phone, our country’s most prized possession and/or obsession. At any one time, there are 100 million phone conversations taking place in our country, five of which are happening in my house alone, and all of which are […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru My father used to pace around the house in his “thinking underwear” yelling, “Where’s the spam…Where’s the spam?” It’s not that he liked spam. In fact, he hated it. It was the idea of spam he loved, or more accurately, the fact that a can of spam is opened every four seconds. […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru Walk into my fathers office and you can pretty much guarantee two things: one, he is asleep when you get there and two, there is some sort of odd sculpture sitting on his desk. Right now, he has this paper clip-fortune cookie attached to some “green slime” he picked up from a […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru In the Belgian province of Antwerp, there is a small town called Duffel, population 16,019. It is here where the simple bag of cloth was born many years ago. The makers of this bag—in their infinite wisdom—called it the Duffel Bag. Today, it is a staple of American Life. Originally used by […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru To come perfectly clean: I have just spent the last eight hours watching a “24” marathon on TV. To make matters worse, it’s Tuesday, in the middle of the day and I’m not sick, tired or out of work. Oh, and I have Tivo. My day started normal enough. I got dressed […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru I still remember my ninth birthday. The whole beautiful thing—friends, family, presents, games, cake, candles and, of course, Uncle Isadro, who at the end of my party, put his teeth back in his mouth, raised his scotch to me and said, “Kid, ten million people share your birthday…you’re not that special.” Now, […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru Alright, I’m going to flip flop a little from my last post. The only thing cooler than an Etch-A-Sketch, would be an Etch-A-Sketch satellite system, complete with laser gun, infrared scope and rappelling rope. Yes, I still passionately love low tech and stupid, but, at the end of the day, there is […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru This just in: 27% of all male college students believe life is a meaningless existential hell, which brings me right to our featured product of the day: the Etch-a-Sketch Key Chain. My regular readers know what I’m talking about. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I believe we need to lighten […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru The cosmos contains approximately 50,000,000,000 galaxies, with somewhere near 1,000,000,000,000 stars in each galaxy. Underneath those stars, there are 6,526,685,554 people on earth, which may not mean much to you, until you consider that if the entire population of China were to run past you in single file, you would not live […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru Today, I want to talk about Frisbees, also called “pie tins,” Pluto Platters and in Rush Imprint’s case, the 9” Flyer. First off, let’s just say I’m a nostalgic freak. I love Hula Hoops, 3-D glasses and the Fonz, not to mention Ozzie & Harriet and Father Knows Best, black and white shows […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru Who do you love? Come on…who do you really love? Yes, you love your spouse, kids, parents and friends. Yes, I know…they light up your life and complete you. But, between you and me…who do you really love? Yeah, that’s right. You love yourself, don’t you? We all do. Carly Simon was […]
Virgil Winston:Marketing Guru If you think you’ve had a long week, remember the ancient Aztec week was twenty days long, which not even a three-day weekend could save. Throughout history we have used all types of time-telling devices—sundials, pendulums, candle clocks, hour glasses, calendar clocks, and for the ancient Incas of Peru, even time measured […]
